The New Orleans Shotgun House
The most plentiful architecture type in the city of New Orleans! Some would also say it’s the most beloved. Nothin’ like a classic.
Single shotgun house located Uptown
Beautiful!! Let’s start with the basics.
They were built from around the 1830’s-1950’s.
Body style is typically long and narrow- lots of times they’re WAY bigger than they appear on the front.
They come in a many different styles. Single, Double, Camelback, Sidehall, and my favorite, a Side Gallery. The style in which folks decorated these houses are numerous due to the amount of time they were in production.
Around the 1830’s, New Orleans was on it’s way to becoming the third largest city in the U.S., and it was during this time when the first shotguns started to appear here. We kept growing until the outbreak of the Civil War (1861), and naturally, our growth slowed during that period and many folks left.
After the Civil War ended in 1865, the city began to resume it’s growing. More German, Irish and Italian immigrants poured into the city to help with our growing railroad industry, among other things, and the housing and buildable land was getting harder to come by. The narrow footprint of the shotgun house and the price to build them was perfect answer for this problem and so the building frenzy began. This was a common solution in many other cities as well (though I do have to say we did it best).
Around this time, the wood working technology had advanced, and ornamental millwork was being turned out in mass numbers. The Queen Anne, the Eastlake, and Bracket Style housing were born! This is known as the (late) Victorian Period. The different pre-cut elements were available all over the country in catalogs like Sears Roebucks and builders and home owners took full advantage of this, pairing the different elements with lots of color. Even the existing structures slapped these bad boys on. Can’t say I blame them.
We will dive deeper into the styles of New Orleans housing later on. I’m sure this was enough information for today.
